In time for Women’s Day, the artistic outcome of the first call of the Lilly Reich Grant for Equality in Architecture opened at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona. Running till the 22nd March 2020, the exhibition entitled Re-enactment, carried out by Laura Martínez de Guereñu, aims to put the spotlight on Reich’s overlooked work.
A response to the pervasive invisibility of Lilly Reich’s work, Re-enactment aims to reveal the “architecture that Lilly Reich projected for the German sections of the 1929 International Exposition inside eight Noucentista Palaces, an area that is fifty times greater in magnitude than the Pavilion itself”. In fact, this is the first time that German designer Lilly Reich’s work is exhibited. Re-enactment brings together letters, pictures, patents, hallmarks, blueprints and films, some of them unpublished, from different archives and private collections.
Being able to gather all this material and documentation, including unpublished photographs, at the German Pavilion in Barcelona is an exceptional fact. For the first time, you can see the design and architecture that Lilly Reich created to characterize the German Sections at the 1929 International Exposition, according to a clear thread. It was a visual and spatial system to present more than 300 companies and industries in eight different Palaces in which the display cabinets, now rebuilt in the Pavilion, played a key role. -- Laura Martinez de Guereñu, author and professor in IE School of Architecture and Design.
Occupying the Pavilion with two display cases, similar to the ones designed by Lilly Reich for the 1929 International Exposition, architect Laura Martínez de Guereñu transformed the spatial experience. The intervention removed “the double-gazed screen and [made] the skylight, that originally established the hierarchic differences between the inside space and the popular outside space”.
The first display case suggests the unusual path inside the Palaces. Gathered from different archives and private collections from Barcelona, Berlin, Dessau, Frankfurt, Madrid, Sevilla and Weimar, the recovered photos of Barcelona that Reich herself regretted losing in a bombing, showcase “how her display-cases accomplished the scalar transition from the great variety of German products to the very diverse spatial structures of the Palaces”.
The second display case “highlights the importance of the immaterial heritage of the work performed in Barcelona, showing the Pavilion as an anteroom to more than 16.000m2 of industrial exhibitions”. Standing vertical, it offers the point of view of two films, the first being the original film by Ramón de Baños, from 1929 kept in the Filmoteca de Catalunya; and the second is part of a recovery project by Begoña Soto-Vázquez for the Filmoteca Española in 2009, as a commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Iberoamerican Exposition in Seville.
Thanks to this research, we now know much more about Lilly Reich's great work in Barcelona for the International Exposition of 1929. The intervention resulting from the 1st Lilly Reich Grant for Equality in Architecture makes visible the contributions of this pioneer, filling in holes that historiography of architecture has forgotten, and returns to Barcelona a part of its history. -- Anna Ramos
